Hand of the Hunter

CHAPTER SIX

Lights swallowed Hweilan's senses, her emotions, her…

Everything.

She let them. More, she welcomed it. All the fear, all the confusion, all the hurt-burned away by the light, until she was left with only…

Hweilan. That essential spark of her. Not of wanting or doing or hurting. Just being.

And when she knew that, when she was only awareness, the light became not just a purifying fire, but revelation. Thought became more than the light. Before she had seen the light. Now, she could see by the light. And she sawA hundred lifetimes of her ancestors. Vil Adanrath. People of the Hunt. She saw through the eyes of her grandmothers and grandfathers, every intimate detail. And she saw with the eyes of gods, beholding all as if from afar. Life for her people was not paradise, but it was good. They lived, they loved, they served their gods, and they died, for hundreds of generations. To survive they hunted, mostly the deer and elk and other herd animals of the high hills and northern snowfields. But there was never any lack. And when the Vil Adanrath died, their bodies returned to the ground, where they fed the grass, which fed the herds, which fed the people. And thus did they live in the Balance of Dedunan, of Silvanus the Forest Father, living, loving, killing, dying, being born, world withoutNo. Because it did end. With Jagun Ghen.

Burning Hunger. The Destroyer. From the Abyss he came, and for generations we fought him, but he grew stronger, destroying our homeland. We fled…

A voice out of her past. She almost put a name to it, then it too bled into the light, swallowed.

She saw the devastation Jagun Ghen brought. She felt disgust and horror, and even anger and pity at seeing what the Destroyer did to the People. But it had not touched her. Years and generations separated her from all this.

Dedunan intervened, the familiar voice again. Jagun Ghen was cast from the Hunting Lands, and escaped to Toril.

But his flame was not extinguished. Only banished.

The voice from the light changed, and this voice she did know. It was the mind that had ripped through her own, that face that almost drove her to madness. Nendawen. Hunter.

In the Hunting Lands, Jagun Ghen almost conquered. Only hundreds of years of blood and sacrifice vanquished him. Here…

And she saw Toril, floating in the void amidst the stars.

… in this corrupt world beneath its cold stars…

And she saw mountains. Ones she knew. The Giantspires, running like a jagged spine between frozen Narfell and the lands of the Damarans.

Here… Jagun Ghen could become a god…

"The power you seek," said the old crone, "is not like the Art of southern spell-weavers with their muttering and powders and twaddling fingers."

She leaned in close over the low fire, the orange flames painting her pale skin and paler hair a devilish orange. So deep were the wrinkles in her face that each of them was its own well of shadow, so that her eyes shone out as if from a burning mask.

The man across from her sat in shadow by the wall of the tent. But when he looked up the light of the fire caught in his eyes.

"Sorcerers' spells, the incantations of the strongest wizards I could find, ministrations of priests… none could help me, could cure my…"

He leaned forward, leaving the shadows behind, revealing the horror of his features. He was bare from the waist up, completely hairless, his skin a mottled patchwork of snow-white and bruised blue, and he squinted against even the dim light of the fire. Spellscarred.

When his sentence remained unfinished, the old woman said, "Affliction?"

"Will this pact cure me?" he said.

The crone closed her eyes and shook her head. "As I told you, the power you seek… it is not like the Art. Here, there are no strict laws-give, take; empty, fill; push, pull; act, react. Here, you are not dealing with the forces of nature, or even the intricacies of the Weave. Here, you are wrestling with a will, a being of vast power and knowledge beyond our imagining. It is not in its nature to serve another. To bend it to your will-"

"Will it cure me?"

Even though her eyes were still closed, she turned away. "Spellplague" she almost spat the word. "If there is a cure, it is beyond any power I have ever known."

The man's face twisted in a rictus of fury, and he took in a rattling breath.

"However," the old woman spoke before he could, "the one you seek has power far beyond any I have ever known. Beyond any mortal's. If there is a cure-if! — then it lies in the pact. But I give you no assurances. Only hope."

"Then I need only one thing from you-the name."

The old woman opened her eyes and gave a resigned nod. She seemed, for once, at ease, relieved. "You have everything else you need? The words of summoning? The sacrifice? The-?"

"I need only the name."

The old woman hesitated, as if catching something in the man's tone. "I wonder… what is your… affliction? I have heard that the spellscars grant some great power. Yet you seem desperate to be rid of yours."

"Some"-the man's upper lip curled, revealing flawless white teeth-"bear no more than a tangle of blue flesh, easily covered. Look at me." He leaned forward so far that the smoke from the fire wafted over his torso. "Look at me!"

The old woman shied back a moment. Then she cackled and said, "Look at me."

She spread her arms so that the fabric of her robe fell away. Scars riddled both arms, front and back. Her left hand lacked two fingers, and half the thumb was gone from her right. One of the larger scars running from the inside of her elbow to her wrist trembled slightly, as if something were wriggling just beneath the skin.

"The pact…" she whispered. "You play with fire, boy, you be ready to burn. And you are playing with something much worse than fire now."

"I am not playing, old woman."

"And yet you still haven't answered my question." She lowered her arms and leaned forward so that her nose was only inches from his. "What does your spellscar do?"

He didn't back away. "I want the name."

"Tell me the nature of your spellscar, and I will tell you the name."

The man opened his mouth, then looked askance as if something had occurred to him. The hint of a grin flickered in one corner of his mouth, then he sat back, both hands on his knees. "Tell me the name," he said, "and I'll show you."

She watched him through narrow eyes, weighing his words, searching for any sign of deception.

"Very well," she said at last, and she told him the name. "Jagun Ghen. Destroyer. Burning Hunger. The rites you have prepared… call Jagun Ghen."

"Thank you," said the man.

The blue patches on his skin flickered with a pale blue light, like the very base of a candle flame. Then they flared, a bright flash.

The smile froze on the old woman's face, her last breath rattled out of her, and she fell forward into the fire, sending up a shower of sparks.

He knew the demands of the pact, and he knew just the place: An open vein leading down into the darkest heart of the world-a cave in the last of the Giantspires' northern foothills. He went alone, for he had no acolytes, no friends. His own people had never truly loved him, but after the Spellplague, they had shunned him, naming him Kharta Vaaj, shunned of the gods.

Down and down he went, far beyond even where bats roosted, to where his only companions were spiders and other crawling things that fled from the meager glow of his lamp. There lay a cavern, its center filled with black water, columns of stone everywhere, some thick as old pines, some thin as needles, all damp and slick and smelling of secrets.

He made the circle on the shore of the pool, scratching it into the dust with the burned, jagged end of an antler, then filling the grooves with twice-burned ashes. Muttering the incantation that would prepare his mind, he punctured the center of his left palm with the antler, then mixed the blood with the ashes to make the symbols of power inside the circle's edge.

And here, Hweilan's vision expanded. A part of her remembered a time from another life, long ago and far way. She had stood in a high window of a castle, looking down on a courtyard where her grandfather's warriors gathered. The window glass was thick to keep in the heat and push back the outside cold, and when her mother entered the room from behind her, she cast a distinct reflection in the window, so it seemed as if her ghost walked over the men below. Two scenes, separate, one atop the other, bleeding into one. This was like that.

She saw the hairless, mottled man, etching foul symbols into the dirt with his own blood and ash. But atop that she sawThe Forest Father intervened…

Jagun Ghen's servants were cast from the Hunting Lands into the Abyss. But their Master fled. The Hunting Lands held no more safety for him, but neither would he suffer the Abyss. And so…

Deep within Faerun, the spellscarred man called upon forces beyond his world, summoning them to his pact circle.

He did this alone, but in those final moments, he remembered the words of his own master, the demonbinder of the tribe" The circle, the words of power, the symbols that contain the words and more… properly done can open a door to beings beyond this world. But take care, Argalath. Take care. Make the sacrifice. Speak the words exactly. Still… with an open door into such places, one is not always certain what may come through. Make your circle well. Strengthen your own will. For such is the binding that…"

She lost the rest, and with her vision in both worlds, she saw why. Desperate in his flight Jagun Ghen fled to the first open door he found. At his first sight of the demon, the name faltered on the binder's lips, and Jagun Ghen tore his way through the circle, overwhelming the spellscarred man.

But just as Nendawen was not of Faerun and thus not free to roam as he pleased, Jagun Ghen could not wholly roam unbound. He fled into the one place of safety he could find-the room prepared in Argalath's mind. He took it, making it his own, and over the ensuing years taking more and more of Argalath's mind, fusing it with his own.

He bided his time, searching for the way to break into the prisons of the Abyss where his brothers and servants lay locked away, tormented by their own twisted minds. At long last he found the lore, the key that would unlock their prisons.

And a new vision superimposed itself over these. She saw the moonlight mountaintop, the desecrated shrine, the gathering of acolytes and supplicants, and she recognized some of them. Argalath, Guric, and men of Guric's company whose names she did not know. Several young Nar were there as well-by their shaved heads and scars, she thought they had to be Argalath's acolytes. She saw poor Valia, three years dead, unwrapped from her burial shroud. Guric's soldiers dragged forward a man, bound and gagged. She knew him as well. Soran…

That name brought forth the first pang of emotion since she had been reduced to awareness. Love, admiration, respect, but also a hint of fear. No, not fear. But real terror, and horror at something he had done, someAnd she saw Argalath unlock the foul thing's prison, saw the demon enter the dead woman and raise her to an undeath filled with a never-ending hunger.

Here… Jagun Ghen could become a god…

And in that state of almost pure awareness, she knew it had begun.